Sunday Sunday

It was over the weekend when I was putting together my new two tier cake stand and filling it with sandwiches and cakes that I started thinking about Sundays when I was little. They were very ritualistic, they  never changed for the longest time and I wonder how similar it was for others. In fact, Saturday was a very samey day but not half as much fun as Sunday. I thought I would like to document these Sundays here, for the sake of nostalgia.

First some background information. I grew up with my grandparents and my uncle Paul. My grandad died when I was seven and my uncle married and moved out the same year. We lived in a modern town house in Portsmouth. On the ground floor was the kitchen and under stairs cupboard where the electricity meter was. On the first floor was Paul's bedroom, a dark as you like toilet where I thought The Ugly Wuglies from The Enchanted Castle lived and the living room. The top floor was where my nan and grandad's bedroom was as well as my room and the bathroom and airing cupboard.

While still at first school, I adored Sundays. No school and unlike Saturday I wasn't dragged around the shops against my will and then made to suffer the final results while grandad did the pools at the kitchen table. "West Bromich Albion 2 .." oh the monotony.  Sunday was mine. Often I would enter the kitchen on a Sunday morning to find the distinct smell of curry as Paul had been to a curry house before coming home the previous night and the paper bag he brought it home in was still on the table. One Sunday morning I  even found a huge hole in the kitchen wall, made by Paul, who had come home drunk and had evidently had a score to settle with the wall. That hole stayed there the longest time. But these things weren't necessarily part of the staunch ritual of Sunday. While my grandad was alive they would always start the same way, with him going to the radiogram and putting on one of his Jim Reeves records - LOUD, so it could be heard downstairs. The radiogram was on the middle floor landing and looked exactly like this -

(source)

Once Jim was singing, a fry up was the order of the day, to line the stomach for what came next, as every Sunday my grandad went to The American Bar in Old Portsmouth. Often my uncle went too and when I was lucky, I got to go too, though I was usually left in my grandad's Ford (Cortina? I don't rightly recall) outside with a bottle of Coca Cola and a straw and a packet of Rileys crisps with instructions not to get out, or unlock the doors or speak to strangers.

If I didn't go with my grandad, I was out on my bike with friends. It seemed all the neighbourhood children were out on their bike on a Sunday. There were no adults on the streets, just children and passing by houses, you could smell roast dinners being cooked in every home. Kitchen windows were partially steamed up, with maybe a window open to let out the heat and steam.

Called back in for dinner, back we all went, emptying the streets as though the Pied Piper had passed through. Grandad was back by this point and once he had had his fill of the Sunday roast, he promptly retired to the living room where he slept away the afternoon. I was a finicky eater and hated the Sunday roast, I never was one for eating meat, so Sunday dinner filled me with horror.

With grandad asleep on the sofa snoring, back out I went, making the most of the day, as before long I was called back in again for Sunday tea which was usually sandwiches with leftover roast meat in them and then cake. My nan was never a baker, she was more adept at making pastry so we often had a fruit pie with ice cream which was purchased in brick form. Remember those? A brick of ice cream in a cardboard carton, which was then given to our greyhound Patchie, who would chase it around the kitchen, licking it clean. If we  had cake, they were usually Mr Kipling cakes - Bakewell tarts or pies, fondant fancies, Battenberg cake or Swiss roll (yum). As much as I liked the sweeter side of Sunday tea, it also marked the end of a day of freedom, as next came the weekly bath (when did baths become more than once a week?), followed by The Muppet Show and then bed, ready for school next day.

I often thought I would like to pass on the ritualistic Sunday to my own children were I that lucky (minus curry smells and holes in the walls with Jim Reeves crooning from somewhere in the house), but sometimes things don't work out as you would like and this makes me sad as I know I would have been a wonderful mum.